Browsing Tag

introductions

607

Europe and NATO Since Ukraine

By Carl J. Strikwerda and Ruud van Dijk

Scholars of Europe from both sides of the Atlantic assess some of the impact of the war between Ukraine and Russia on NATO, European institutions, and individual European countries. Will NATO get stronger or weaker as the war persists in a stalemate and populist and isolationist political parties assert themselves in member countries? Will the renewed unity among EU members persist in the face of the obstacles lying ahead in Europe?

Thinking Eurasia Now

By Arina Rotaru

Beyond religious and economic divisions, the question of the differences between Asia and Europe has remained constant in attempts to define Eurasia. While warning of the reactionary potential of Eurasianism, this feature looks into possibilities of convergence between Europe and Asia.

Homelessness and Poverty in Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros and Elizabeth B. Jones

While policymakers rightly blame the COVID-19 epidemic, the war in Ukraine, and persistently high levels of inflation for the lack of progress in alleviating homelessness and for the dire shortage of safe and affordable housing in many places, these factors have exacerbated rather than created a complex problem that touches a wide array of people at different life stages and under various socio-economic conditions.

The Politics of Postmigration

By Markus Hallensleben and Moritz Schramm

The concept of postmigration has allowed for a rethinking of migration studies, the political borders of Europe, and the ongoing history of colonialism.

Decolonizing European Memory Cultures

By Katrine Sieg and Hélène B. Ducros

Academic specialists, artists, activists, and museum professionals have engaged for at least two decades in the project of “decolonizing” the memory cultures that shore up European identity.

Rethinking the Human in a Multispecies World

By Hélène B. Ducros

Non-human, more-than-human, other-than-human, posthuman, transhuman, anti-human, multispecies, transspecies—all are terms that have been circulating in the humanities and social sciences, but have lacked clarity in their definitions, interpretations, purposes, uses, and range of application.

Displacement, Memory, and Design

By Ava McElhone Yates, Maria Höhn, and Chase Estes

Across Europe and the US, large scale projects addressing the history and memory of displacement are underway. All of these efforts are concerned not only with rectifying the prevailing historical narratives but also with using design as a way to tell a more appropriate and inclusive narration.

European Culture and the Moving Image

By İpek A. Çelik Rappas, Michael Gott, and Randall Halle

From the earliest days of film as a sideshow attraction to the present multiplatform mode of reception, moving images in Europe—in their broadest sense—have been imagining communities in various forms.

Sustainable European Cities and Digitization

By Nicole Shea and Zsuzsanna Varga

This feature offers insights into developing the sustainability of European cities through a number of case studies of recent social and technological practices, while also foregrounding the role of the digital in modernization.

Race and Racism in Europe: The Urgency of Now

By Jean Beaman and Jennifer Fredette

Since the police killings of Breonna Taylor in March and George Floyd this past May, hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across the United States to call for an end to police violence—and, sometimes, the abolition of police altogether.

Rurality in Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros

In this roundtable on “Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe,” EuropeNow wishes to convey a portrait of an agricultural Europe that shows its dynamism and adaptable capacity in the way it mirrors and incorporates the major concerns of our time and faces the historical legacies of past agricultural practices and policies.

Networks of Solidarity in Times of Crisis

By Matthew Brill-CarlatAva McElhone Yates, and Maria Höhn

Even in the more prosperous countries of the Global North, poor communities and communities of color—be they Indigenous, Black, migrants, or another minoritized group—are being ravaged by COVID-19 to a far greater extent than white and more privileged communities.

Imagining, Thinking, and Teaching Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García

This issue gathers a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary scholarship where all Europeanists have a place, whether they consider themselves European studies scholars, integration studies scholars, or European Union studies scholars.

European Art, Culture, and Politics

By Randall Halle

The European project is one that I have come to describe as dis/union—a dynamic of push-pull factors that remain constant. Precisely because there is a European project, the dynamic of union and disunion, contentious skepticism and optimism, pro and contra, which are part of all polities, obtains within the EU and at the broader European level.

Me Who? The Audibility of a Social Movement

By Sarah Cooper and Koen Slootmaeckers

The disparagingly fickle and fleeting attention of citizens often times serves to dilute the extent of actual change following public scandals, but it arguable that the mounting critical mass of cases of sexual assault and harassment now punctuating the media’s gaze opens a prominent window of opportunity for the social movement on the political agenda.

Narration on the Move

By Brittany Murray and Matthew Brill-Carlat

Together, these contributions indicate new ways to narrate forced migration, rooted in past actions of hospitality while remaining responsive to contemporary challenges. As these contributions demonstrate, the call to build sustainable models of defying borders is at the same time a call to rethink academic categories.

Digitization of Memory and Politics in Eastern Europe

By Eszter Gantner and Olga Dovbysh

In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in digital technologies and their influence on the production of memory, history, and heritage, not only within academic research, but also in politics, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia. The tendency toward selective history, heritage, and memory politics in the region manifests itself more and more in the digital sphere.

Public Health in Europe

By Sigrún Ólafsdóttir and Jason Beckfield

Health is a major political, cultural, and societal issue across Europe. While health and illness have, of course, always been a part of the human experience, the epidemiological transition from infectious, deadly diseases to the increased burden of chronic and mental health problems, has put various pressures and constraints on policy makers.

Confronting Waste

By Hélène B. Ducros

Will we seize this moment as an opportunity to make strides in waste reduction and develop ecological solutions for surplus, unused, and rejected materials of all sorts, or will we simply seek out new trash havens elsewhere in the world?

United in Diversity

By Randall Halle

“United in diversity” is the official motto of the EU. Yet this special issue appears at a moment when European unity seems distant, and diversity seems to foster disunion, conflict, and cultural clash, rather than accord. We may do well to recall that the motto reaches back to the immediate post WWII era and the attempts to overcome the cataclysm of the war.

Forced Migration, Displacement, and the Liberal Arts

By Maria Höhn, Brittany Murray, and Nicole Shea

As institutions of higher learning, we are uniquely positioned to draw on our robust local, national, and international educational and cultural networks to prepare our students for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of forced migration and displacement. Indeed, the coming era of human movement will, without doubt, challenge our existing national and global institutions, and our students must be able to respond to these challenges with intelligence, compassion, and ingenuity.

Water in Europe and the World

By Nicole Shea and Peter Debaere

Fresh water is essential for life. No plant, animal, or person can live without it. Because whatever we do requires a lot of water, cities and towns were initially built next to rivers or streams, and farmers grew crops where water was plentiful or accessible. Water abundance cannot be taken for granted any longer everywhere. A dry spell and record temperatures caught up with Europe this summer, testing farmers from Scandinavia and England as well as France, the Netherlands, Germany and southern European countries.

Crime and Punishment

By Christopher M. Florio and Nicole Shea

The study of crime and punishment is bound up with the study of a host of other subjects, ranging from social welfare to immigration to imperialism, from law to race relations to education. It is our hope that this issue helps readers to understand how crime and punishment have long been and continue to be entangled with virtually every side of human existence.

Radicalism and Violence in Europe

By Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Nicole Shea, and Fabian Virchow

In this special issue, artists and authors take up these issues in a series of feature essays and works, short opinion pieces, and research reports, examining questions of radicalism and violence, prevention and intervention, and radicalization and de-radicalization across Europe and other parts of the world. The authors examine cases from Germany, France, Hungary, the U.K. and beyond, looking at social media, school-based interventions, the use of history by far groups, the role of public intellectuals, and more.

Food, Food Systems, and Agriculture

By Hélène B. Ducros

The articles and interviews included here clearly convey that food stands as an entry point into a wide range of contemporary and historical debates that touch all humans. What is more, they also indicate that food operates as a spatial and temporal link across a complex web of interconnected social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, demographic, nutritional, and physiological topics

Anxiety Culture

By Nicole Shea and Emmanuel Kattan

The challenges of climate change, pandemics, mental illness, rapid technological change and its impact on work and individual freedom, migration and its social and political consequences are not always best understood under the prism of “crisis.” Rather, they seep into our collective consciousness, building on an increased sense of insecurity and powerlessness and shaping our relationships with others and the world.

Europe-China Relations

By Eamonn Butler and Nicole Shea

It has been more than 40 years since the first formal, diplomatic relations between China and the European Union (EU) were established. In the subsequent years, relations between these two global economic powerhouses have significantly developed, with both the EU and China publishing and implementing a number of communiqués intended to build and strengthen partnership.

Contemporary Urban Research in the European City

By Nicole Shea and Eszter Gantner

By now, urban public spaces have become strongly contested resources in present European cities, where multiple agents are claiming the right to these spaces. Reacting to this development, this special issue concentrates on European cities, focusing on their public spaces, their histories and their rich heritages.

Katrine Ogaard Jensen; Kayla Maiuri; Nordic Voices

New Nordic Voices

By Katrine Øgaard Jensen and Kayla Maiuri

A selection of emerging writers from Nordic countries—Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Faroe Islands.

Beyond Eurafrica: Encounters in a Globalized World

By Hélène B. Ducros

With this special feature, EuropeNow confirms the web of connectivity that exists between nations of Europe and nations of Africa, as not only rooted in geopolitics and global economic flows, but also increasingly in global cultural flows, which support the enduring linkages and reciprocal influences between the two continents and shape the ways in which both Africans and Europeans apprehend the local and the global.

Nationalism, Nativism, and the Revolt Against Globalization

By Manuela AchillesKyrill Kunakhovich, and Nicole Shea

This special issue examines the resurgence of far-right groups, considering how recent events in Charlottesville can illuminate radical movements in Europe. It focuses on three key elements: nationalism, nativism, and the revolt against globalization. Nationalism was the word most associated with the Charlottesville rally, whose participants often called themselves “white nationalists.” By this, they meant that a racialized national identity should be the condition for political belonging.

Diversity, Security, Mobility: Challenges for Eastern Europe

By Nicole Shea and Peter Haslinger

In this special anniversary edition of EuropeNow, curators Peter Haslinger and Nicole Shea highlight the importance in research and culture of smaller central and eastern European regions. The research presented here assesses the concepts, paradigms, and methods for the re-evaluation of multi-ethnicity, diversity, and mobility in a globalized and “post-factual” era, and seeks to identify factors and agencies that help to explain the current trends towards the obsession with security agendas.

The Crises of European Integration

By Erik Jones, Regine Paul, and Nicole Shea

The inescapable politics of knowledge production about and for a Europe in crisis demands scholarly transparency. In this issue, we consider the value and limits of their disciplinary perspectives in explaining the recent crises of European Integration. We nail our colors to the mast by arguing that a political economy approach is valuable – and ought to be cherished – for seeing more than just economics vs. politics at play in explaining crisis and navigating Europe’s future.

Governing the Migration Crisis

By Jennifer Elrick, Oliver Schmidtke, and Nicole Shea

We have seen two opposing trends across Europe: On the one hand, civil society has demonstrated a great degree of compassion with the plight of refugees, organizing local welcome committees and, in the Canadian case, even putting pressure on the government to accept more refugees from Syria as a fundamental humanitarian commitment of the country. On the other hand, the populist Right has exploited the influx of so many refugees for their political mobilization.

Tourism: People, Places & Mobilities

By Hélène B. Ducros and Katrine Øgaard Jensen

In Europe, from the time of religious pilgrimages or journeys to spa towns for thermal treatments, all sorts of people have undertaken recreational travel since at least the Middle-Ages, even if motivations differed. But, it is with the industrial revolution that tourism took on a new face with the practice of the tour. Later, the emergence of paid leave in many places gave the impetus for the first mass tourists.

The Gender of Power

By Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, Kayla Maiuri, and Gill Allwood

Given the severity of challenges facing Europe, from Brexit and the Trump administration’s thinly veiled hostility to the EU and NATO, to the on-going influx of refugees and the rise of populism, writing about gender and sexuality might seem quaint, even indulgent to some people. They would be mistaken. Any thorough examination of the political, social, and economic situation of Europe in the early twenty-first century takes gender and sexuality seriously.

Sustainability & Innovation

By Maria Höhn and Nicole Shea

In this challenging time of governmental retrenchment—with its accompanying cuts to the Arts and Humanities—many foundations have been stepping up and pivoting their missions to a defense of democratic values and shared cultural heritages. At the same time, institutions of higher learning, think tanks, artists, policy makers, and NGOs have been reimagining their mission and innovating new models of collaboration not only among like-minded institutions, but across disciplines and national boundaries.

Facing the Anthropocene

By Hélène B. Ducros

Our global dependence on fossil fuels, nuclear power, intense resource extraction economies, genetic manipulations, air, soil, and water contamination, and byproducts of modernity such as waste material like plastics and other synthetic polymers have caused great disturbances in the Earth ecosystems on which many species depend, including the human species.

Forced Migration, Cultural Identity, and Trauma

By Nicole Shea and Turhan Canli

In political analysis, scientific inquiry, literature, poetry, language, and the arts, we examine the loss of culture and identity and the effects of trauma on the human mind, as well as the healing power of artistic expression.

The Politics of Health Equity in Europe

By Courtney McNamara and Jennifer J. Carroll

The essays presented in this special feature address the growing public and political concern over increasing levels of social stratification and reveal the political relevance of health inequalities across Europe. Specifically, we asked health inequality experts to reflect on some of the biggest challenges surrounding health inequalities in different European countries.